Saturday, October 1, 2011

What Rules My Life

The following is an exact transcript of an English class essay I wrote in middle school (9/29/98, to be exact) recently rediscovered by my parents in our basement.I was such a brat.

What Rules My Life

People often talk about how hard it is to live with a teenager, but they never seem to talk about how hard it is to be a teenager and live with your parents. Parents can be nice, but a lot of the time they are mean or annoying. For instance, I'll be up in my room, doing homework or listening to music, when all of a sudden my dad calls me to come down. I get up, put down my homework or turn off the radio and start down. After about two seconds, my dad will yell up

"Come on Austin!!!"

Which, of course, is exactly what I'm doing, so I yell back down to him

"I AM!!! I can't get there in two seconds!!!"

Which by then gets both of us mad. There are a lot of things like this that make my parents seem a lot meaner than they are. Take for example, piano lessons. I HATE playing the piano. I think it's boring, hard, and useless (unless I could get a job for playing the piano which I couldn't). But my mom, a piano teacher, couldn't possibly have a son who isn't another Beethoven or Mozart, so I've been taking piano lessons for about six or seven years, hating every minute of it.

Parents also make me do stuff like staying up 'til 10:00 to do English assignments instead of doing them in the morning, eating stuff I hate (like peas) and doing so many chores I could probably sue them for child labor and win (we're lucky to earn one hour of minimum wage in a WEEK!).

Then of course, there are grades. My parents have this idea that all their kids should get all A+'s on every report . [sic] They might let a B slip by now and then, providing it's a B+. In other words, we have to be almost perfect on our report cards. One little slip and they take away TV, computer, N64, food (well, not quite food YET, but maybe soon).

This is the end of my wonderfully fabulous essay about my parents, my Supreme Dictators for Life. Please give me a good grade, because if you don't, you never know. I might not come to school, one day, then the next, then the next. Finally you get curious and call home, but my parents completely deny ever having a son named Austin...